The arrival of GDPR has accelerated the attention for privacy. Who has access to what personal data of personal or clients? How are personal data filtered from research data sets. How is internet traffic anonymized for detection of DDOS attacks?

In all these cases, there is a major gap between the legal requirements and their technical implementation.

We have designed and implemented Nescio, a domain-specific language for the description of anonymization policies. A policy describes which part of the data should be anonymized and how the sensitive parts should be hidden. The actual anomyzation is carried out by the Nescio implementation: it parses the data, finds the relevant parts in the data and anonymizes them.

Forensic evidence is becoming more and more digital. Files on confiscated devices (laptops, cameras, mobile phones) need to be analyzed and searched for relevant data. Unfortunately the amount of different data and message formats (jpeg, mpeg, word, pdf, …) is already overwhelming and rapidly growing. Manually implementing analysis tools for each format becomes prohibitive. Therefore we have created BIRD, a domain-specific language for describing and parsing binary data. From a description of a data format we automatically generate the corresponding parsing tool to analyze that specific data format.

An extensive overview of this approach is described in the dissertation by Jeroen van den Bos: Gathering Evidence: Model-driven software engineering in automated digital forensics.

Timely arrival of ambulances at the location of an incident can be a matter of life and death. Based on mathematical modelling and stochastic simulation, we have built Seconds, a system for optimizing ambulance response times. Shortly, Seconds will be deployment in several security regions in The Netherlands.

Essential business data is usually scattered over heterogeneous (relational, graph, elastic) databases. We are involved in designing and implementing a high-level query language for such polystores : a single query can be dispatched to the polystore and the results from the various databases are retrieved, integrated and returned in a uniform, standardized way. Bottom line: data analytics becomes enabled on all available business data.